We Lost Our Virginia-ty

Steve's last day of work was on the 26th. We flew to Rapid City, SD on the 27th, returned on the 29th, and watched the Redskins BEAT those Cowboys on the 30th!  Wow, this retirement stuff is wearing us out.

On Thursday we flew out of Richmond, VA to Rapid City, SD via Cincinnati and Minneapolis to establish domicile in SD. While there we obtained our new SD driver's licenses, titled and registered the MH and Fit, registered to vote, and even obtained a public library card.

We were one of the last flights to arrive at approximately 11:00 pm on Thursday night.  No problems, however, as a shuttle took us efficiently to our hotel.  It was 0 degrees when we arrived. Got up early on Friday morning and took the shuttle back to the airport to rent a car for the day.

Yes, that is snow and it was way too cold for us "easterners".   You know it's cold when the rental car company leaves a note and window scraper in your front seat.

We first went to the SD DMV office.


The time from walking in the door to walking out with our new SD licenses took us a total of 15 minutes!
That would never happen in VA.  Plus our driver's license pictures were much nicer looking.

Next stop was the Rapid City courthouse complex to title and register the vehicles.  We thought we were in trouble when the clerk wanted a "physical" address for the registrations.  We had done our homework on the proper paperwork to bring with us by reading the information posted on the Americas Mailbox website. Americas Mailbox is our chosen mail forwarding service and their site is very specific to what items are needed to accomplish the things we needed to get done.  When we told the clerk that we were Fulltime RVers and selecting SD as our legal domicile state she called over her supervisor who knew exactly what we were doing.  After that everything went smoothly.  Total time to title and register both vehicles was about 30 minutes.  Again, we were amazed.

Traveled down to the other end of the courthouse building to become registered voters.  Completed an application form, showed the clerk our new driver's licenses and consumed another 5 minutes.

Next we were off to the public library.  This is certainly not a requirement for establishing legal domicile, but we just wanted to take a look at the library.

Karen with new library card in hand.

The total time to complete all of the things described above was approximately 2 1/2 hours.  We were impressed!  It was now noon, but we still hadn't visited our "home" yet at Americas Mailbox.  A short drive and we were there.



Hard to believe that 3500 people "live" here



One Brave Soul (Actually, the rig was being stored here,
but the owner was elsewhere.)

      
Americas Mailbox has a small FHU campground
behind there building which is actually quite handy for someone coming to the area to do what we were doing, or for touring the area.  There were many attractions we wanted to see in this area, but will need to return when it's a bit warmer.








Now on to see our new "home".

The neighbors are friendly and very quiet!

Other than the flights (which we have really come to detest through the years) the trip went well.  All of the people we met were very helpful and friendly.  The offices were much more efficiently run than those I've dealt with in Virginia.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot to speak to today's blog opening title.  (Which Karen thought up, BTW)

We returned to Richmond late Saturday night and had to get up early Saturday morning and install those new license plates to make our vehicles official.

The Honda Fit




Tiffin Phaeton

 We are now South Dakotans!